www.eeggs.com has a list of easter eggs in various programs.
The problem is that it's not bloated enough!
on
All Hail Bloatware
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· Score: 2
This article is scary, since I don't think the author (a self-confessed Micros~1 programmer) is kidding.
>Sadly, it is you, the customer, who demands bloat, forever clamoring for new features. [...] > The day that Microsoft fails to convince you to upgrade--i.e., to buy a product that the malcontents call bloated--is the day that Redmond becomes a ghost town.
In other words, "the customer demands" that Micros~1 stays in business and keeps hauling in money. Yeah, right.
> Most bloatware complaints come from users who own 2-to 3-year-old machines. They don't understand that the new (bloated) versions of software are meant for the new 400-megahertz machines [...] not their Pentium 133 doorstops
This would be OK, _IFF_ there was any form of document compatibility between versions. Otherwise, it's just a forced-upgrade circle jerk with the CPU manufacturers. "Sorry, your 1997 car doesn't work with the 1999 gasoline". AutoCAD is another program which regularly pulls this scam, and I think it's about time for customers to stop accepting this philosophy.
> The elegance of the Windows 98 operating system is that it runs practically every application from the DOS days and all those goofy Windows 3.1 programs.
Insert your own sarcastic reply here.
>Software companies take your wish lists seriously, and then make them happen.
So in closing, which customer asked for dancing paperclips, and can somebody please hurt him/her???
Re:SIMM-beowulfed computer?
on
uCsimm News
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· Score: 1
>could it be possible to put 8 of those little nifty devices in my old mobo? that would be nice!
Although they would physically fit into a 30-pin memory socket, the electrical meaning of the various pins is different. To make a beowulf cluster you'd need a custom "motherboard", probably including an ethernet hub.
However, since these modules are only clocked at 16 MHz, it would take a lot of them to out-perform a single StrongARM-class chip. These modules seem much better suited to distributed control and home automation than to number-crunching.
The mass (and momentum) of a spacecraft is much less than that of a comet, so the effect will be minimal. However, even without our prodding, some comets do hit the sun - see http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/comets/SOHO_sungraz ers.html
Sort of... you can use a Palm as a line-of-sight (IrDA) wireless terminal to a Corel Netwinder. I don't know if anyone's maintaining the package (and I never got it to work), but it's at www.netwinder.org/~ryansh ("Corel Palm Administrator").
Re:Palm Power and Wireless Clarification
on
Inside the Palm VII
·
· Score: 1
>The yellow thing you see at the top of the device is not a rechargable battery. It is a capacitor
You mean the tube with the "Ni-Cd" recycling symbol on it?
Come on. There are enough cries of 'conspiracy!' and 'censorship!' when a Slashdot article disappears for technical reasons. You'd never hear the end of it if this one got yanked.:-)
(We do need a 'crackpot' icon for the front page, though).
Throw in a few spelling errors, write some poetry about it, paste in your high school yearbook photo, and I'll BELIEVE!!!
--------
Of course, we also know: 1) Cats always land on their feet 2) Toast always lands butter-side down
Therefore, a cat with a piece of buttered toast taped to its back MUST levitate when dropped! [not original, but I don't remember where I first heard it]
Hey, I have one of those (NiCd battery + photovoltaic cells).
The alcohol-powered fuel cell is (or will be) real as well. Hasn't anyone seen Futurama? This will be the power source for robotics in the future!
(You could probably make a decent glass hammer as well if you really tried. Glass can be surprisingly tough if it's tempered, then the surface is chemically etched to remove microscopic cracks).
Well, this could be an antigravity machine. Or it could be a hot-air balloon, or a cheap ion engine. It's actually pretty easy to get forces around high-voltage equipment, just caused by ionization of the air. See http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/lecdem/el10.htm for a simple lab demonstration of this effect.
(If you could make the antigravity device perform in a vacuum, it would be slightly more interesting).
I have ADSL (yay!), and their terms of service[1] include a monthly limit of 1 gigabyte/month rather than any artificial rate caps[2] or restrictions on what services you can run. To me this is a much less invasive way of encouraging customers to share the bandwidth. The 1G limit is not yet enforced, but it's always been advertised very clearly on the FAQ pages, so nobody can be surprised if/when they switch it on.
p.s. I loved the title of the leaked @home document, "Upstream Enhancement". Sure makes me glad that the local cable company kept me on their "coming soon" list for so long that ADSL became available before they finally got around to wiring my neighborhood.
[1] BC Tel "Multimedia Gateway" in Vancouver, BC, Canada. CDN$65/month, 3 Mbits/s download speed, approximately 640 kbits/s upload speed.
[2] Apart from the natural asymmetry of ADSL rates.
The Netwinder (www.netwinder.org) supports headless operation. If there's no keyboard detected, the Firmware (equiv. to x86 BIOS) will switch to the serial port. Of course, Netwinders are rather more expensive than low-end x86 boxes, so this may not help you.
I don't think it's possible to do a hard reset from the serial port, but there might be some way to add this. I believe the Netwinder also has a hardware watchdog timer, which would remove some of the need for a reset line.
(My Netwinder runs headless, but it's within arm's reach of my desk so I haven't had to worry about remote resetting).
As others have mentioned, compile in serial-console support in the kernel, and make sure that your/dev/console has the correct device numbers (or make it a symlink to ttyS0).
I don't know how Wyse does it, but the Netwinder boots directly from a 1M flash chip, mapped as ROM rather than as a disk drive. The flash contains a small (~64k) boot loader + debugger and a compressed Linux kernel, and can also contain a compressed initrd image (handy for some 'rescue' situations where you've trashed your hard drive; with 1M flash there's only room for a couple of utilities).
To me, the "hacker mentality" is to look at something, figure out how it works, and see how it might be adapted to other purposes. Anything that relies on "security through obscurity" is a prime target, and the Seti folks should have realized this.
IMHO, distributed computing will ultimately have to rely on open protocols and software. It seems to me that redundancy is probably the easiest way to validate data; send the same block to 2 or more randomly-selected clients around the world, and compare the results (ideally, there would be some sort of checksum returned rather than just a Yes/No result). I would also think that participants could "earn" trust over time if their blocks were always legitimate. I know it's nowhere near as simple as this in the real world, but I think this is the direction in which people should be heading.
BTW, I downloaded their client for Linux/x86 but it wouldn't talk through my SOCKS5 proxy server. My other computer is a Netwinder, and I didn't see a Linux/ARM client there. And I don't have anywhere *near* enough free time to try to spoof their servers, so I've abandoned the whole project.
The ftp directory has a case-error, "/M6" instead of "/m6". I just downloaded the package (240 Kbytes/sec, I *love* my ADSL) and am about to try it out.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/milest ones/ says a bit about Milestone 6, and some of the upcoming ones.
I wish the Mozilla folks luck, and I'm looking forward to the day when it becomes usable enough for me to switch. Netscape 4 just has *way* too many bugs and security holes, and I really want to move to an Open Source product (where hopefully the problems will be easier to find and fix).
>how come their isn't an explosion when the positrons hit the electrons in the atoms of body tissues? or don't they colide?
They do collide and "explode" into a pair of gamma-ray photons moving in opposite directions. These two photons travel to a ring of detectors around the patient's head, and the difference in arrival times tells you how far along the line between detectors the positron was when it hit the electron. With some serious acquisition bandwidth and number-crunching, you can transform this set of detector events into a pretty color picture of the inside of someone's head (a map of the rate at which the tagged chemical is being consumed at each part of the brain).
The energy of each photon is 511 keV, equal to the mass of an electron or positron (in a system of units where "c" is defined as 1).
>Witness the progress of AntiMatter. Until recently it was just theory, then some scientists managed to get a couple anti-hydrogen (I think) atoms happening.
Antimatter did start off as theory, but experimental confirmation came a long time ago (positively-charged electrons were discovered in cosmic rays). Antiparticles have been a routine part of experimental physics and medical imaging for decades (a "PET" brain-scan uses a positron-emitting isotope). Getting an antiproton and an antielectron to slow down enough to form an atom was a tricky engineering problem, but it wasn't anything fundamental.
The general path of most discoveries (for example, a nuclear reactor) seems to be: 1. It's possible in theory 2. We can do it experimentally 3. Nature already did it
It'll be interesting to see what happens with this warp-drive idea. BTW, for a good layman's intro to wormholes and time travel (including a new way of looking at 'causality'), look at:
"Black Holes and Time Warps : Einstein's Outrageous Legacy" by Kip Thorne (ISBN: 0393312763, $13.56 at amazon.com)
My mom runs RedHat and KDE...
on
UNIX for Moms
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· Score: 1
>On Redhat at least, runlevel 5 will start up with XDM on console 5 and switch to it, so you get a nice graphical login prompt and a "shutdown" button.
Sure, but a login prompt and shutdown button are unnecessary complications, since my mother is the only one using the machine at the moment. When/if my dad wants to use the machine as well, I will change over to kdm (which has a very nice-looking SGI-style login screen) and teach them how to use it. For now, an Amiga-style single-user mode is the best fit to her needs. Of course, thanks to virtual consoles, I can always log in as another user and run a second X server without disturbing the default setup. Try *THAT* on Micro$oft-ware...
My mom runs RedHat and KDE...
on
UNIX for Moms
·
· Score: 2
>I would imagine that 99% of mothers don't know what an OS is, nor do they want to know.
I completely agree. My mom is presently running RedHat 5.2 and KDE, but she doesn't know it.
All she knows is that when she turns on the power and waits a few minutes, a desktop appears. She knows which icon to click when she wants to send E-mail or look up an article on the PBS website. One of her hobbies is photography, and she knows which icon brings up a WordPerfect document containing a sorted subject index of her photo albums (and how to add new entries). She knows that when she's finished using the computer, she selects "Logout" and waits for it to say 'system halted' before turning off the power. [1]
My mom is intelligent but non-technical. I don't think she had used a computer since GUIs came around (she used to use my Commodore 128 for word processing and stuff). She wanted to get onto the Internet but didn't want to spend the money for a new computer, so I put together a system (P75 / 48M RAM / 1.2G HD) from parts I had left over after upgrading my computer. I considered buying Microsoft Windows 98, but it was over CDN$250 (www.megadepot.com lists it as MSRP $296.18, their price $261.46) [2]. That's about as much as the rest of the hardware was worth, and it wouldn't have made the computer any easier for the things she does with it (and would have made it harder for me to install / maintain). Sure she may miss out on a few web sites that require specialized plug-ins, but on the other hand she won't have to deal with a deluge of BSOD's and macro viruses either. It's my job to make the computer do what she wants it to, just like it's my job to fix any electronic devices which have broken since my last visit (which I consider a fair trade for a few days of food and lodging).
[1] This auto-login, auto-shutdown required two minor customizations: a script to 'su' to her userid, run 'startx', wait for it to exit, then run 'shutdown -h now'; and a change to/etc/inittab to launch this script automatically.
[2] Sure I could have obtained an illegal copy for less, but I wouldn't feel right giving my mother stolen goods.
The Netwinder has a 1M flash memory containing a Linux kernel and an intelligent boot-loader that lets you choose a kernel and root device to boot from (this can be from a local disk or over the network). While LILO can only find a kernel by knowing its physical location on a disk, the Netwinder boot manager mounts a partition and looks for the kernel by name. There's a lot of other cool things that can be done with decent firmware; I'd be glad to see yet another bit of legacy x86 baggage go on the scrap heap.
Hydrogen fuel cells are nice, and I'd like to see the technology gain acceptance (I have friends who work at Ballard power sysetms). However, in the short term I think there are better places to focus your R&D attention (especially since hydrogen is just a storage medium, not an energy source). One simple step is the hybrid fuel/electric car, which operates an internal combustion engine at a low-power, high-efficiency operating point and uses stored electrical energy for high-power operations like accelerating or going up hills. The pollution from IC engines can be reduced significantly by simple tricks like pre-heating the catalytic converter before starting the engine, or re-circulating the exhaust gasses until the converter warms up. Alcohol or methane-based fuels can burn cleaner, and can also be produced from agricultural waste, etc.
An even better step would be to reduce the amount of driving required. This is where communications media like the Internet can make a real difference, by enabling more people to work at home (or live at work, and interact with your family over the net...).
Uranium fission is dirty, but I wouldn't say it should be banned. Uranium is naturally radioactive and comes from holes in the ground, so putting the fission products back into a hole in the ground really isn't making things much worse. As long as the operators of fission plants are required to maintain their equipment and dispose of their waste safely, I say let them keep doing it until other technologies become more affordable and put fission plants out of business.
Solar power is good, but the surface of the earth is a rather poor place to collect it. Yet another reason we need a couple of moon bases and space stations.
>Can a magneplanar speaker be used in this sense, since it is an array of many small speakers? >Has anyone tried to create a simple/single 3d sound solution out of a magneplanar speaker?
To produce "3D" audio (or even "2D") you need two independent channels of audio, corresponding to the sound going into the listener's left and right ears. If you're using headphones, this is a relatively easy exercise; just send the right signals to each side, and you can get excellent image placement.
The problem with trying to do 3D through speakers is that normally the sound from the left speaker reaches both the left and right ears, and similarly for the right speaker. This crosstalk results in the standard "1D" stereo audio - you can only place sound sources on a line between your speakers.
However, there are algorithms which can anticipate the crosstalk which will occur, and can pre-correct the signals to cancel the crosstalk. It turns out that planar magnetic speakers are quite good for this, because they have a larger, more uniform radiating area than a cone speaker, and also because the dipole pattern of sound radiation decreases unwanted reflections from desktop clutter.
Also note that planar magnetic speakers are not really an "array of many small speakers", since there is typically only one set of electrical connections to the diaphragm, and thus the same electrical current passing through every part of the diaphragm. Therefore, you can't feed different signals to different parts of the speaker, and can't do any neat phase tricks to get better 3D.
Check out this System with Amazing Reviews
on
Flat Panel Speakers
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· Score: 1
Thanks for the mention - I'm an engineer at the company that manufactures the Monsoon speakers ( Sonigistix Corporation ) and I have an MM-1000 system at home. Over the next few months we will be introducing some new models at lower price points, which we hope will be as well-received as the MM-1000 has been.
For anyone interested in the technical details of the MM-1000, it's a pair of 4x8" planar-magnetic speakers using Neodymium magnets and a mylar/aluminum diaphragm, with a regular (cone) subwoofer. The core technology has been around for many years, but we've made some advances in optimizing it for the desktop and for 3-D audio.
Another planar-magnetic computer speaker with excellent reviews is sold by Eminent Technology in Florida.
Linux on desktop systems for non-root people
on
Linux on Dilbert
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· Score: 1
>Your mom raised you. Give her decent software.
Well, this weekend I set my mother up with a hand-me-down computer running Linux. She has very little computer experience and no MS conditioning, so I figured it would be no harder for her to learn KDE/Netscape/Wordperfect than Win98/IE/MSWord (and cheaper too).
Linux - If it's good enough for Dilbert's mom, it's good enough for yours.
Slashdot Mirror
www.eeggs.com has a list of easter eggs in various programs.
This article is scary, since I don't think the author (a self-confessed Micros~1 programmer) is kidding.
>Sadly, it is you, the customer, who demands bloat, forever clamoring for new features.
[...]
> The day that Microsoft fails to convince you to upgrade--i.e., to buy a product that the malcontents call bloated--is the day that Redmond becomes a ghost town.
In other words, "the customer demands" that Micros~1 stays in business and keeps hauling in money. Yeah, right.
> Most bloatware complaints come from users who own 2-to 3-year-old machines. They don't understand that the new (bloated) versions of software are meant for the new 400-megahertz machines [...] not their Pentium 133 doorstops
This would be OK, _IFF_ there was any form of document compatibility between versions. Otherwise, it's just a forced-upgrade circle jerk with the CPU manufacturers. "Sorry, your 1997 car doesn't work with the 1999 gasoline". AutoCAD is another program which regularly pulls this scam, and I think it's about time for customers to stop accepting this philosophy.
> The elegance of the Windows 98 operating system is that it runs practically every application from the DOS days and all those goofy Windows 3.1 programs.
Insert your own sarcastic reply here.
>Software companies take your wish lists seriously, and then make them happen.
So in closing, which customer asked for dancing paperclips, and can somebody please hurt him/her???
>could it be possible to put 8 of those little nifty devices in my old mobo? that would be nice!
Although they would physically fit into a 30-pin memory socket, the electrical meaning of the various pins is different. To make a beowulf cluster you'd need a custom "motherboard", probably including an ethernet hub.
However, since these modules are only clocked at 16 MHz, it would take a lot of them to out-perform a single StrongARM-class chip. These modules seem much better suited to distributed control and home automation than to number-crunching.
The mass (and momentum) of a spacecraft is much less than that of a comet, so the effect will be minimal. However, even without our prodding, some comets do hit the sun - seez ers.html
http://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/comets/SOHO_sungra
Sort of... you can use a Palm as a line-of-sight (IrDA) wireless terminal to a Corel Netwinder. I don't know if anyone's maintaining the package (and I never got it to work), but it's at www.netwinder.org/~ryansh ("Corel Palm Administrator").
>The yellow thing you see at the top of the device is not a rechargable battery. It is a capacitor
You mean the tube with the "Ni-Cd" recycling symbol on it?
Come on. There are enough cries of 'conspiracy!' and 'censorship!' when a Slashdot article disappears for technical reasons. You'd never hear the end of it if this one got yanked. :-)
(We do need a 'crackpot' icon for the front page, though).
Throw in a few spelling errors, write some poetry about it, paste in your high school yearbook photo, and I'll BELIEVE!!!
--------
Of course, we also know:
1) Cats always land on their feet
2) Toast always lands butter-side down
Therefore, a cat with a piece of buttered toast taped to its back MUST levitate when dropped!
[not original, but I don't remember where I first heard it]
If I remember correctly, an alkane is any single-chain hydrocarbon containing only single bonds (methane, ethane, propane, butane, ...).
>4) Solar Powered Flashlights
Hey, I have one of those (NiCd battery + photovoltaic cells).
The alcohol-powered fuel cell is (or will be) real as well. Hasn't anyone seen Futurama? This will be the power source for robotics in the future!
(You could probably make a decent glass hammer as well if you really tried. Glass can be surprisingly tough if it's tempered, then the surface is chemically etched to remove microscopic cracks).
Well, this could be an antigravity machine. Or it could be a hot-air balloon, or a cheap ion engine. It's actually pretty easy to get forces around high-voltage equipment, just caused by ionization of the air. See http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/lecdem/el10.htm for a simple lab demonstration of this effect.
(If you could make the antigravity device perform in a vacuum, it would be slightly more interesting).
I have ADSL (yay!), and their terms of service[1] include a monthly limit of 1 gigabyte/month rather than any artificial rate caps[2] or restrictions on what services you can run. To me this is a much less invasive way of encouraging customers to share the bandwidth. The 1G limit is not yet enforced, but it's always been advertised very clearly on the FAQ pages, so nobody can be surprised if/when they switch it on.
p.s. I loved the title of the leaked @home document, "Upstream Enhancement". Sure makes me glad that the local cable company kept me on their "coming soon" list for so long that ADSL became available before they finally got around to wiring my neighborhood.
[1] BC Tel "Multimedia Gateway" in Vancouver, BC, Canada. CDN$65/month, 3 Mbits/s download speed, approximately 640 kbits/s upload speed.
[2] Apart from the natural asymmetry of ADSL rates.
The Netwinder (www.netwinder.org) supports headless operation. If there's no keyboard detected, the Firmware (equiv. to x86 BIOS) will switch to the serial port. Of course, Netwinders are rather more expensive than low-end x86 boxes, so this may not help you.
/dev/console has the correct device numbers (or make it a symlink to ttyS0).
I don't think it's possible to do a hard reset from the serial port, but there might be some way to add this. I believe the Netwinder also has a hardware watchdog timer, which would remove some of the need for a reset line.
(My Netwinder runs headless, but it's within arm's reach of my desk so I haven't had to worry about remote resetting).
As others have mentioned, compile in serial-console support in the kernel, and make sure that your
I don't know how Wyse does it, but the Netwinder boots directly from a 1M flash chip, mapped as ROM rather than as a disk drive. The flash contains a small (~64k) boot loader + debugger and a compressed Linux kernel, and can also contain a compressed initrd image (handy for some 'rescue' situations where you've trashed your hard drive; with 1M flash there's only room for a couple of utilities).
To me, the "hacker mentality" is to look at something, figure out how it works, and see how it might be adapted to other purposes. Anything that relies on "security through obscurity" is a prime target, and the Seti folks should have realized this.
IMHO, distributed computing will ultimately have to rely on open protocols and software. It seems to me that redundancy is probably the easiest way to validate data; send the same block to 2 or more randomly-selected clients around the world, and compare the results (ideally, there would be some sort of checksum returned rather than just a Yes/No result). I would also think that participants could "earn" trust over time if their blocks were always legitimate. I know it's nowhere near as simple as this in the real world, but I think this is the direction in which people should be heading.
BTW, I downloaded their client for Linux/x86 but it wouldn't talk through my SOCKS5 proxy server. My other computer is a Netwinder, and I didn't see a Linux/ARM client there. And I don't have anywhere *near* enough free time to try to spoof their servers, so I've abandoned the whole project.
The ftp directory has a case-error, "/M6" instead of "/m6". I just downloaded the package (240 Kbytes/sec, I *love* my ADSL) and am about to try it out.
t ones/ says a bit about Milestone 6, and some of the upcoming ones.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/miles
I wish the Mozilla folks luck, and I'm looking forward to the day when it becomes usable enough for me to switch. Netscape 4 just has *way* too many bugs and security holes, and I really want to move to an Open Source product (where hopefully the problems will be easier to find and fix).
[somewhat offtopic; sorry]
>how come their isn't an explosion when the positrons hit the electrons in the atoms of body tissues? or don't they colide?
They do collide and "explode" into a pair of gamma-ray photons moving in opposite directions. These two photons travel to a ring of detectors around the patient's head, and the difference in arrival times tells you how far along the line between detectors the positron was when it hit the electron. With some serious acquisition bandwidth and number-crunching, you can transform this set of detector events into a pretty color picture of the inside of someone's head (a map of the rate at which the tagged chemical is being consumed at each part of the brain).
The energy of each photon is 511 keV, equal to the mass of an electron or positron (in a system of units where "c" is defined as 1).
>Witness the progress of AntiMatter. Until recently it was just theory, then some scientists managed to get a couple anti-hydrogen (I think) atoms happening.
Antimatter did start off as theory, but experimental confirmation came a long time ago (positively-charged electrons were discovered in cosmic rays). Antiparticles have been a routine part of experimental physics and medical imaging for decades (a "PET" brain-scan uses a positron-emitting isotope). Getting an antiproton and an antielectron to slow down enough to form an atom was a tricky engineering problem, but it wasn't anything fundamental.
The general path of most discoveries (for example, a nuclear reactor) seems to be:
1. It's possible in theory
2. We can do it experimentally
3. Nature already did it
It'll be interesting to see what happens with this warp-drive idea. BTW, for a good layman's intro to wormholes and time travel (including a new way of looking at 'causality'), look at:
"Black Holes and Time Warps : Einstein's Outrageous Legacy" by Kip Thorne (ISBN: 0393312763, $13.56 at amazon.com)
>On Redhat at least, runlevel 5 will start up with XDM on console 5 and switch to it, so you get a nice graphical login prompt and a "shutdown" button.
Sure, but a login prompt and shutdown button are unnecessary complications, since my mother is the only one using the machine at the moment. When/if my dad wants to use the machine as well, I will change over to kdm (which has a very nice-looking SGI-style login screen) and teach them how to use it. For now, an Amiga-style single-user mode is the best fit to her needs. Of course, thanks to virtual consoles, I can always log in as another user and run a second X server without disturbing the default setup. Try *THAT* on Micro$oft-ware...
>I would imagine that 99% of mothers don't know what an OS is, nor do they want to know.
/etc/inittab to launch this script automatically.
I completely agree. My mom is presently running RedHat 5.2 and KDE, but she doesn't know it.
All she knows is that when she turns on the power and waits a few minutes, a desktop appears. She knows which icon to click when she wants to send E-mail or look up an article on the PBS website. One of her hobbies is photography, and she knows which icon brings up a WordPerfect document containing a sorted subject index of her photo albums (and how to add new entries). She knows that when she's finished using the computer, she selects "Logout" and waits for it to say 'system halted' before turning off the power. [1]
My mom is intelligent but non-technical. I don't think she had used a computer since GUIs came around (she used to use my Commodore 128 for word processing and stuff). She wanted to get onto the Internet but didn't want to spend the money for a new computer, so I put together a system (P75 / 48M RAM / 1.2G HD) from parts I had left over after upgrading my computer. I considered buying Microsoft Windows 98, but it was over CDN$250 (www.megadepot.com lists it as MSRP $296.18, their price $261.46) [2]. That's about as much as the rest of the hardware was worth, and it wouldn't have made the computer any easier for the things she does with it (and would have made it harder for me to install / maintain). Sure she may miss out on a few web sites that require specialized plug-ins, but on the other hand she won't have to deal with a deluge of BSOD's and macro viruses either. It's my job to make the computer do what she wants it to, just like it's my job to fix any electronic devices which have broken since my last visit (which I consider a fair trade for a few days of food and lodging).
[1] This auto-login, auto-shutdown required two minor customizations: a script to 'su' to her userid, run 'startx', wait for it to exit, then run 'shutdown -h now'; and a change to
[2] Sure I could have obtained an illegal copy for less, but I wouldn't feel right giving my mother stolen goods.
The Netwinder has a 1M flash memory containing a Linux kernel and an intelligent boot-loader that lets you choose a kernel and root device to boot from (this can be from a local disk or over the network). While LILO can only find a kernel by knowing its physical location on a disk, the Netwinder boot manager mounts a partition and looks for the kernel by name. There's a lot of other cool things that can be done with decent firmware; I'd be glad to see yet another bit of legacy x86 baggage go on the scrap heap.
Hydrogen fuel cells are nice, and I'd like to see the technology gain acceptance (I have friends who work at Ballard power sysetms). However, in the short term I think there are better places to focus your R&D attention (especially since hydrogen is just a storage medium, not an energy source). One simple step is the hybrid fuel/electric car, which operates an internal combustion engine at a low-power, high-efficiency operating point and uses stored electrical energy for high-power operations like accelerating or going up hills. The pollution from IC engines can be reduced significantly by simple tricks like pre-heating the catalytic converter before starting the engine, or re-circulating the exhaust gasses until the converter warms up. Alcohol or methane-based fuels can burn cleaner, and can also be produced from agricultural waste, etc.
An even better step would be to reduce the amount of driving required. This is where communications media like the Internet can make a real difference, by enabling more people to work at home (or live at work, and interact with your family over the net...).
Uranium fission is dirty, but I wouldn't say it should be banned. Uranium is naturally radioactive and comes from holes in the ground, so putting the fission products back into a hole in the ground really isn't making things much worse. As long as the operators of fission plants are required to maintain their equipment and dispose of their waste safely, I say let them keep doing it until other technologies become more affordable and put fission plants out of business.
Solar power is good, but the surface of the earth is a rather poor place to collect it. Yet another reason we need a couple of moon bases and space stations.
>Can a magneplanar speaker be used in this sense, since it is an array of many small speakers?
>Has anyone tried to create a simple/single 3d sound solution out of a magneplanar speaker?
To produce "3D" audio (or even "2D") you need two independent channels of audio, corresponding to the sound going into the listener's left and right ears. If you're using headphones, this is a relatively easy exercise; just send the right signals to each side, and you can get excellent image placement.
The problem with trying to do 3D through speakers is that normally the sound from the left speaker reaches both the left and right ears, and similarly for the right speaker. This crosstalk results in the standard "1D" stereo audio - you can only place sound sources on a line between your speakers.
However, there are algorithms which can anticipate the crosstalk which will occur, and can pre-correct the signals to cancel the crosstalk. It turns out that planar magnetic speakers are quite good for this, because they have a larger, more uniform radiating area than a cone speaker, and also because the dipole pattern of sound radiation decreases unwanted reflections from desktop clutter.
Also note that planar magnetic speakers are not really an "array of many small speakers", since there is typically only one set of electrical connections to the diaphragm, and thus the same electrical current passing through every part of the diaphragm. Therefore, you can't feed different signals to different parts of the speaker, and can't do any neat phase tricks to get better 3D.
Thanks for the mention - I'm an engineer at the company that manufactures the Monsoon speakers ( Sonigistix Corporation ) and I have an MM-1000 system at home. Over the next few months we will be introducing some new models at lower price points, which we hope will be as well-received as the MM-1000 has been.
For anyone interested in the technical details of the MM-1000, it's a pair of 4x8" planar-magnetic speakers using Neodymium magnets and a mylar/aluminum diaphragm, with a regular (cone) subwoofer. The core technology has been around for many years, but we've made some advances in optimizing it for the desktop and for 3-D audio.
Another planar-magnetic computer speaker with excellent reviews is sold by Eminent Technology in Florida.
>Your mom raised you. Give her decent software.
Well, this weekend I set my mother up with a hand-me-down computer running Linux. She has very little computer experience and no MS conditioning, so I figured it would be no harder for her to learn KDE/Netscape/Wordperfect than Win98/IE/MSWord (and cheaper too).
Linux - If it's good enough for Dilbert's mom, it's good enough for yours.